A long white dress like the one in the first season finale of Buffy. I am neither Madonna nor whore but a blazing white pillar of female power and agency. Demon slayer and teenage dream.

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Got wrong

Rosé. As a bartender suffering from an abundance of ego and an excess of youth, I decided that pink wine and the women that rarely stray from it were beneath me. I was so deeply wrong. I drink my shame almost daily this summer and wash it down with fried chicken.

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Can't stop reading

Maggie Nelson. Whose hybrid of memoir, criticism, theory and womanhood make each book a life source for those feeling disenfranchised, disembodied, dire, desirous.

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Am grateful for

Single mothers. As we celebrated Father's Day, I felt an unending sense of gratitude for the woman who was both mother and father and provider and friend when those who bore the correct sexuality disappointed.

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Reject

Sexual shame. Especially from my female peers. I expect a certain amount of slut-shaming in our current climate, but I am consistently surprised by women putting down the erotic work of others and subsequently marginalizing open female sexuality to a joke or a fad.

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Publicly cried about

Mad Max. It's all been said by better watchers and writers than I, but I was so grateful to see women full of power, action and fertile futures. Their happy ending was so unexpected and unprecedented that it shocked me to tears.